SpeechTEK Mobile Program

Heath Ahrens is the founder and CEO of iSpeech®, a cloud-based text to speech and speech recognition provider.  In 2009, Ahrens pioneered a new solution to distracted driving with the launch of DriveSafe.ly®, an award winning mobile app used by over 9 million.  Powered by iSpeech, DriveSafe.ly mobile app reads text messages and emails aloud in real time and allows voice response – completely hands-free.  In addition to winning About.com’s Readers Choice Award for Best BlackBerry App, DriveSafe.ly won the 2010 Mashable Award for Best Mobile App and the Mobile App Showdown at CES 2011.  The anti-distracted driving application has been written about in Consumer Reports, major blogs such as TechCrunch and CrackBerry and featured on CNN, CNET, ABC, and FOX.  Ahrens continues to grow iSpeech, delivering human quality speech and recognition instantly to all Internet enabled devices.  In 2010, Heath was named to NJBIZ’s 40 under 40. Ahrens has spoken about speech technology and distracted driving at Mobile Voice Conference, CTIA 2010 and at several MBA seminars at New Jersey Institute of Technology.  Ahrens successfully leads the iSpeech team in their effort to offer the highest quality speech technology to developers through simple to use interfaces and cloud technology.

Graham Allen is a Senior Director for Product Strategy & Portfolio Management at Convergys. He has 16 years of experience in product management, implementation and strategy development.

Joe Alwan Vice President & General Manager AVOKE Caller Experience Analytics Raytheon BBN Technologies

Joe Alwan is VP/GM of the AVOKE Caller Experience Analytics division of Raytheon BBN Technologies.  Prior to BBN, Joe was VP/GM of the contact center division at Empirix.  Joe started his career in an HP support center and later developed HP’s server strategy and business plan.  He built Sun’s global partners team, and held senior sales and marketing positions at Open Market, an early innovator in enterprise internet software.  Joe earned a B.S. with honors in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois.

David John Attwater Senior Scientist EIG UK Enterprise Integration Group

David has over 17 years of experience of speech and touch-tone user interface design and test.  David has a specific focus on customer usability testing and has recently been very involved helping clients investigate the use of voice biometrics and alternative security solutions for banking applications.  He is an acknowledged expert in the design and test of natural language solutions for customer service.

R.J. Auburn Chief Technology Officer Voxeo

RJ Auburn, Voxeo CTO RJ has been developing and deploying next-generation telephony systems since he was 15 years old. Today, he is at the forefront of Voxeo’s technology innovation and integration. He is the editor and chair of the W3C Call Control XML (CCXML) standard, co-author and editor of the W3C’s State Chart XML (SCXML) standard, and an active leader on a number of other standards, including VoiceXML, Media Control, and SIP. RJ is an acknowledged expert in the fields of voice recognition, call control, and call center integration.

Paolo Baggia is currently Director of International Standards of Loquendo and actively involved in W3C and the VoiceXML Forum, where he is a member of the Board of Directors. Formerly, he lead the VoiceXML browser development for Loquendo’s VoxNauta platform. In 1989, he joined CSELT, Telecom Italia’s R&D lab, and was involved in several research activities, including natural language, speech parsing, spoken dialog design, and language modeling. In 1999, he took part in a large-scale speech application: the automation of TreniItalia railway companys call centers. He holds a degree in computer science from the Universita’ di Torino. He was awarded Speech Luminary 2009 at SpeechTEK NY.

Mithun Balakrishna Research Scientist & Product Manager Lymba Corporation

Dr. Mithun Balakrishna possesses over 10 years of research experience in the area of Speech and Natural Language Processing. He currently heads Lymba Corporation’s research and business thrusts in the area of Spoken Language Technology, and Knowledge Engineering & Management. In his role as the architect and project manager of Jaguar (Lymba’s Ontology/Knowledge-Base Generation and Management product), he focuses on automatically extracting deep semantic information from textual resources, and rapidly creating semantically-rich domain ontologies to help machines understand and answer user queries. He has been a key personnel in several government research projects including Spoken Dialog Question Answering (SDQA), Advanced Question Answering for Intelligence (AQUAINT), Knowledge Discovery and Dissemination (KDD), and Novel Intelligence from Massive Data (NIMD). Dr. Balakrishna has previously held research positions at Intervoice Center for Automated Conversational Technologies, Human Language Technology Research Institute (HLTRI) and Language Computer Corporation (LCC), and has several patent applications and research publications in leading conferences.

Max Ball Director, Product Management Genesys

Max Ball is the Director of Product Management at Genesys Telecommunications, an Alcatel-Lucent company, responsible for their Voice Self Service and mobile products and strategy. Max has over twenty years of industry experience at companies including IBM, S1, and Edify Corporation.

Camilo Bandera has been responsible for the implementation and integration of customer facing technologies and outsourcing relationships. Throughout his life Camilo has spent 10+ years managing and working with call centers and customer contact centers across North America. He has assisted many companies such as AT&T, Jackson Hewitt and Teligence improve their customer service operations using his international background in business and technology. He strongly believes in the strategic value of customer service for any organization while at the same time is conscious of the importance of efficient, quality oriented and cost effective operations. For that reason, Camilo mixes the re-engineering of operational processes to achieve strategic objectives with technology solutions that reduces costs and increases the quality of contact centers. The opportunity to live in many different places and interact with people from many different cultures and backgrounds, together with his fierce interest in global finances and politics, have allowed Camilo to develop a strategic global perspective of world affairs and international business; permitting him to understand the cultural and political implications of outsourcing and off-shoring. Camilo is also an avid reader and enjoys debating about global economy, politics and international relations. He has written many articles in Latin American news papers, holds a business degree from the University of British Columbia and has participated in radio programs with CBC radio Canada and CITR Radio in Vancouver.

Samrat Baul Senior Manager, Application Design and Speech Analytics Voxify

Samrat Baul is a VUI-Design expert with 10+ years experience designing applications for companies like American Express, USAA, Continental and Avis-Budget. He spent his years at Verizon and Tellme prior to Voxify. Samrat has a Master’s degree from the Rochester Institute of Technology and a Bachelor’s degree from St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, India.